Students’ Attitudes Changed

Preliminary results of the student questionnaires on changed entrepreneurial attitudes after the IDEATE Intensive Learning experience

The first edition of the IDEATE Intensive Learning course saw a truly mixed group – 7 female, 9 male, ranging from 1st year Undergraduate studies, through to final year BA and Masters. They came from various disciplines – Arts, IT, Bio-tech sciences, Law and Business.

After the very intensive 8 weeks students reported a steep learning curve especially on the importance of interdisciplinarity in an intercultural course setting. The increasingly agree that being an entrepreneur would give them a great satisfaction, while the teachers notably improved their readiness to leap into uncertainty. This is similar to what the students experienced and what the whole group agreed to be a crucial trait of entrepreneurial behavior: please read some more TEXTUAL IMPRESSIONS here and browse through the VIDEO STATEMENTS FROM SEVERAL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS.

We first wanted to know from the IL feedback if the students had experienced a real difference in the teaching style – they 100% conceded a difference, using words such as: “travel, interdisciplinary, collaboration, cultures, chaos, freedom, presentations, pressure, creative, intensive”. When asked if they had gained new knowledge and skills the students described the knowledge gained using the following terms: “intercultural, interdisciplinary, business, idea generation, evaluation of ideas, developing ideas, business attitudes”. And skills gained were described by the students as “presentation, communication, team work, challenges, compromising, listening, negotiation, flexibility, trust”. When asked to score the importance of the learning to their personal development all students scored these skills as highly important, and 100% would strongly recommend the course to other students. While these anecdotes do not replace the detailed evaluation which will follow in due course, the IDEATE team hope that they will support our conviction that this approach to developing entrepreneurial behaviours through a ‘learn by doing’ pedagogic approach is one that works and is worth pursuing.

Students filled out the same questionnaires two times, once before the course start and another time after course finish. While the complete results are still in analysis, we deem it important to share (at least) the rough results as soon as possible. Below are also two board impressions of the evaluation round after course finish while here you can view several VIDEO STATEMENTS FROM SEVERAL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS.

Entrepreneurial Awareness:
A very significant increase is to benoted in the positive response to tha calim that “An entrepreneur may not bother to acquire more knowledge as long as there is progress in the business”. And similarly in: “An entrepreneur do not have the potential to be successful unless supported by government or individuals.” The only (insignificant) decrease was in agreeing that “An entrepreneur should have a lot of organisational abilities with efficient management skills.” And also in: “An entrepreneur must have drive, persistence, the ability to complete tasks, and be willing to work hard.” ALL other indicators of this section increased. Most significant increase is in both instances in the opinion that: “Being an entrepreneur implies more advantagesthan disadvantages.” which was obviously greatly improved during the course.

Entrepreneurial Intensions:ALL opinion indicators of this set increased during the course in terms of postive acceptance of E.,most significant was the student’s personal claim that: “Being an entrepreneur would give me a great satisfaction.” while the readyness of “starting a business” and “creating my own firm in future” both improved by 0.2.

Entrepreneurial competencies:
A dramatic increase can be observed in “Networking skills and making professional contacts “, similar to “Personal effectiveness skills”, while only the opinion that “Creativity” is a key competence decreased insignificantly, and ALL other indicators increased slightly.

Skills/capacities of an entrepreneur:
The only significant increase was noted on the capacity to “Acquire knowledge how todevelop entrepreneurial narratives” most of others increased slightly, or stayed the same. However, a significant drop was noted in the capacity to “Learn how to examine risks of entrepreneurship” and another big drop is evident in: “Learn how to develop a comprehensive customer value preposition“, while slight drops can be noted in the following: “Acquire knowledge how to generate innovative ideas”, “Develop business etiquette” and “Develop teamwork strategies“.